In the Iliad noble heroes move inexorably, by way of a combination of choice and of forces beyond their control, toward destructio...n and dissolution. We are left with mourning, honour, endurance, and pity. In the Odyssey a somewhat dubiously heroic hero wins his way through various fantastical hazards by means of trickery and ingenuity. The Odyssey is not exclusive; it has room for travel, for rustics and servants, for low life, and for dastardly villains. Its overall movement is away from war and from barbarity towards prosperity and peace, cen tred on the wife and a happy domestic scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The famous painting of The Death of Socrates by David ..., if set aside as a crucifixion picture, brings out a way in which Socrat...es' death was quite unlike that of Christ. While his disciples are in agonies of grief, Socrates himself remains calm and poised; his philosophy has saved him from pain and passion. Christ, on the contrary, dies after hours of torment and doubt. Socrates imperturbably takes the cup of hemlock: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane cries out, "Take this cup from me."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud was, in effect, trying to take the mystery out of myth. Once it was decoded as a history of the unconscious, all was explain...ed. As Anthony Storr put it: "he was only happy when he was reducing things to the lowest common factor; and he did regard the unconscious as primarily the repository of bits of oneself that one couldn't accept." A very different way of looking at the psychology of myth was developed by Freud's one-time friend and colleague Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The fundamental difference between the two is immediately apparent in Jung's dictum that modern man is faced with "the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit." Jung, who was very interested in archaeology and thought of himself as excavating the mind, took myths to represent the inmost thoughts and feelings of the human race, patterns which are the product of inherited brain patterns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »